By Jonathan Gramling

The story of Yolanda Salazar-Torres mirrors the stories of so many people who have emigrated to the U.S., sometimes taking a step or two back before moving forward in their lives. And she has witnessed the growth and evolution of the Latine community in Madison.

Salazar-Torres was born in Morelia, Mexico in the state of Michoacán. But when she was five-years old, her family moved to Mexico City.

“I grew up in a very poor neighborhood,” Salazar-Torres said. “My father was in the army in Mexico. I was at home. I am the oldest. There were 10 children, five boys and five girls. After a while, my father got a house on the military base close to his work. Then we moved to a very nice house, better than the other houses where we had been living.”

As the oldest child, Salazar-Torres felt the necessity of helping the family survive economically. And so at 14 years-old, she began to work at the military base and was a quasi-member of the military.

“I worked in the offices,” Salazar Torres said. “If you are working in the office, you’re kind of a soldier in the field. We had to have discipline and training. I worked in the main offices that the army had. They had a huge
building and a military field where the line soldiers trained. But the work in the offices was totally different.”

At 17-yeard-old, Salazar-Torres got married and left the military.

“I left the army, got married and had my first child,” Salazar-Torres said. “And then I stayed at home. I had Teresa, my second girl. She had a problem with one of her legs. Then I needed to go back to the army because she needed doctors and the medical services. Then I started working at the military hospital. And then they promoted me to the medicine medical school. I was working in the offices too. I worked there for 11 years while my children were growing up. I was working in the military school.”

Due to the need to get a job at 14 years-old, Salazar had stopped her education when she was in middle school. Eventually, as an adult, she was able to resume her studies.

“It was very hard because of the schedules and the hours,” Salazar-Torres said. “I had to be there at 6 a.m. Sometimes I needed to do the bulletins first thing in the morning. They had a place for children. My children went to a public school close to the hospital. I worked there for 11 years. While I worked there, I was studying. I went to middle school and high school. When I was in high school, Guillermo was with me in the high school. We went together.”

While she was working at the base, the Earthquake of 1985 devastated many parts of Mexico City.

“The earthquake was awful,” Salazar-Torres said. “Many buildings went down. We used to work in one of them and we had to move because the building went down. I was late for work fortunately. I was at my home almost ready to leave for work. Teresa and Patricia were here in Madison. But Guillermo was there. And I remember when the earthquake happened, you couldn’t recognize the neighborhood because the buildings were kind of sandwiched down. Salvador, my children’s father, got a huge club and he brought many different things to work looking for people. And then Guillermo decided to go and help. I didn’t know. It was terrible. I didn’t want to stay there. We went to one of my sister’s houses. She was my little sister. From there, we moved to our house in another neighborhood. It was my mother-in-law’s property. We never stayed again in the other building. Nothing happened in there, but I just didn’t want to stay there. It was awful.”